So we're half way through the silly season and there are already Great White sharks off the coast of Polperro and the Beast of Exmoor has shown up.

Swansea has had its own foray into silliness with the brief escape of a 5ft long Tegu lizard.

The black and white creature, more used to the jungles of South America, escaped from a garden in King Edward Road to find itself emblazoned in the pages of The Sun, The Daily Mirror and The Star.

Disappointingly for the summer news industry, the lengthy lizard returned home without terrifying anyone.

It adds to the list of silly season stories in this neck of the woods which includes the “River Python” in the River Tawe which turned out to be an inner tube.

And the “crocodile” in the lake at Swansea’s Enterprise Zone.

Let’s just say it’s not been spotted again.

And of course there are the black panthers in the woods at Margam.

I feel a bit embarrassed to say this but it’s nevertheless true I did come face to face with one once, so I’m knocking them off the list.

Silly stories don’t always happen in that “dry” holiday period at the end of July and the beginning of September.

The infamous “house that looks like Hitler” (on Fabian Way) was an internet sensation in March of 2011.

And UFO stories are an immediate hit whenever they emerge.

Having seen strange lights in the sky while star gazing there’s no doubt UFOs exist.

But they are unidentified flying objects, not space ships commanded by people using universal translators.

And that brings me to Lyn Evans, the Swansea University physics graduate from Aberdare who oversaw the biggest, most serious, most expensive science experiment man (and woman) has ever known.

Dr Lyn Evans, the Aberdare-born scientist who has led the Large Hadron Collider project

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Cern sought to find out exactly what everything is made of and what stops us flying apart.

Despite our truly astonishing leaps in knowledge - the processor in a singing greeting card has more capacity than all the electronic computers on Earth at the time of Sputnik's launch - we still don’t know how everything works.

The LHC then should have been more eagerly anticipated than One Direction’s next album.

But the story that eventually catapulted the collider onto the front pages was essentially a silly one.

Two American claimed it would create “a black hole” that would eat the Earth with the universe for dessert.

But we’re still here and the Higg’s Boson discovery has gone some way to explain why we were here in the first place.

It could be the difference between future scientific discovery and stagnation.